The privatized nature of employment as a domestic servant is often inimical to collective action. Yet in the early 1960s there was significant trade union interest in the working conditions of female domestic servants in Singapore and Malaya. Studies of female domestic service in Malaya (later Malaysia) and Singapore are dominated by work focusing on Chinese-born servants before the Second World War, and migrant maids associated with economic transformation from the late 1970s. If scholarship on pre-war domestic servants leans toward an emphasis on agency, then studies of maids from the 1980s tend toward experiences of abjection. What of the intervening period, during the Cold War, when rapid decolonization introduced new factors into the demography, structure, and regulation of domestic service in Malaysia and Singapore? Did this provide opportunity for greater autonomy, mimic older colonial relationships, or herald new protections for domestic servants in the modern postcolonial state? The considerable historical literature devoted to the relationship between imperial power, colonialism, and domestic service rarely extends to the persistence and dynamics of domestic service in the era of decolonization between the 1950s and the 1970s, although it does explore the increasing feminization of the occupation. This article explores a confluence of factors—the politics of anticolonialism, economic dependence, and apprehension about the privacy of the home—that cohered in a controversy in the 1960s known as the “amah strike,” when female domestic servants in Singapore and Malaya threatened to walk off the job over a proposed change to their employment conditions.

In the Spring of 2020, the onset of the global pandemic intensified existing inequalities, but also accelerated organizing within some of the most precarious economic sectors. The neoliberal university was no exception to this general trend, and from 2020 until 2022, student workers organized for union contracts, just pandemic responses, independent arbitration for harassment and improved conditions at their workplaces. In those years, while neoliberal universities issued empty calls for “community,” and a prompt return to normalcy, student workers mobilized themselves and won unprecedented gains from their institutions, rejecting administrative pleas for the defense of the status quo. The following “Report from the Field,” details the struggle of student workers organizing from 2020 to 2022 at the University of New Mexico, the University of Michigan, New York University, and Columbia University, and offers a collectively authored reflection on the challenges, victories and future concerns of its respective movements.

This article identifies decollectivization as one of the central policies through which the so-called “Uzbek model” mediated independent Uzbekistan's incorporation into the global economy as a cotton exporter. As such, it problematizes the way in which the dominant literature on transition framed the country's independent history since 1991 as a “paradox” of no transition and transformation. Since it theorizes the former as the application of privatization, liberalization, and macroeconomic stabilization, the literature cannot explain why, absent this standard reform package, Uzbekistan still underwent a momentous transformation from full employment and low migration to mass informalization of economic activity and rural outmigration. Instead, I contend, decollectivization entailed a process of mass expropriation of the rural population from the land—primitive accumulation in Marxian terminology—in order to put it to production for capital accumulation. As such, land use was shifted from the collective reproduction of the rural population during Soviet times to the rent-subsidization of capital accumulation after independence, particularly via import-substitution industrialization. The result has been the class stratification of Uzbek society, most evident in the rise of a vast relative surplus population of landless peasants struggling in the precarious informal economy, including as daily workers and labor migrants.

This article argues that precarity partly arises from the growth of household debt in the age of rentier capitalism. It examines the mechanisms of neoliberal finance and its debt-based economic growth model in shaping precarious work and life in Kyrgyzstan. The unequal social relationship between lenders and borrowers generates considerable economic dispossession, appropriation, precarity, and harm. For debt-ridden micro-entrepreneurs, some of the pressures and consequences of debt are acutely felt within their family context, where members struggle to negotiate and ameliorate the impact. By drawing on three case studies of a small farmer, a bakery owner, and a petty trader turned petty producer, the article examines how usurious interest loans plunged them and their families into distress, insecurity, fear, loss, and powerlessness. The first-person accounts of these micro-entrepreneurs-cum-borrowers explain how debt was produced and experienced, and how it was inseparable from the country's rentier capitalist transformation. The study also draws on twenty-nine semi-structured interviews with financial institutions and thirty-three semi-structured interviews with borrowers conducted in Kyrgyzstan.

Until recently, historians, including labor historians, tended to view biography as an inferior genre of historical writing. This has started to change, as biography moves away from its narrow focus on “great men.” Historians increasingly see it as a way to explore, as Marx famously suggested, how men make their own history albeit not under circumstances of their choosing. This essay examines recent biographies of three of the most important labor leaders in Latin America: Chile's Luis Emilio Recabarren, Mexico's Vícente Lombardo Toledano, and Brazil's Lula. Although they approach the study of the interplay of the personal and the political in different ways, all three studies provide strong evidence that biography has an important role to play in sharpening our understanding of the history of labor.

In 1983, the arrest of Noureddin Kianouri, the first secretary of the Tudeh Party of Iran came as a shock to the international community. In a letter of condemnation, communist parties from Indonesia to Jamaica pledged solidarity with their Iranian comrades. The optimism initially brought by the 1979 revolution was severely reversed and the suppression of the Iranian Left by the Islamic government was regarded as an attack on the international Left. A significant voice of opposition came from Britain, with the Communist party of Great Britain (CPGB), the British Labor party, the trade unions and solidarity groups coming out in full support of the Tudeh and to take on the cause of Iran as their own. Although interest had existed since the 1940s, it was the 1979 revolution that firmly placed the Tudeh within the discourse of the British Left, energizing the movement and solidifying its internationalist credentials. Similarly, for the Tudeh, which had become side-lined in Iranian politics and had lost members to more radical strands of the Iranian Left, the attention it received helped renew its activism and sense of purpose.

This article will explore one of the most significant strikes by migrant workers in Britain during the 1970s and the subsequent company closure the year after their victory. In May 1974, a predominantly South Asian workforce at the Imperial Typewriter Company in Leicester went on strike over unequal bonus payments and discrimination in promotion. The shop stewards committee and Transport & General Workers Union branch refused their support and the workforce split partly on racial lines. The strikers stayed on strike for almost 14 weeks until they emerged victorious. Though it appears as a central reference point in histories of migrant experience in Britain, the strike and closure has garnered little systematic, primary research. This article will fill this gap through the use of published sources and extensive unused archival deposits. During the strike part of the largely South Asian workforce sought to break with the racialized division of the workforce between different groups, skill levels, and work-types. Almost immediately after the strike ended in victory the company announced its intention to close down the vast majority of its British production. In Hull 1400 jobs were lost and in Leicester over 1600 were to go. This article shows that whilst the strike might have been the start of a politically, culturally, and intellectually significant period of significant protagonism by Britain's first-generation black and racialized working class, it also marked the beginning of the end of an industrial model dependent on the hyper-exploitation and racialized subordination of their labor. The closure was framed by contemporaries and subsequent historical accounts as a dispute marked more by the end of empire than worker obsolescence. As an article in the Guardian on the closure of the plants was put it in January 1975, it was ‘The day that Imperial&s empire fell'. Yet it might be more accurate to understand the strike as an early premonition of the globalisation of manufacturing production which was to emerge strongly in the 1980s and 1990s. The experience of Imperial Typewriters highlights the central importance of racialized labour hierarchies and immigrant counter-militancy in post-war Britain. The Imperial Typewriter Company provides a case study of how worker resistance to labour intensive modes of capital accumulation, in relatively low capital intensive industries, during a global crisis of capitalist profitability, was followed by the decision of a multinational corporation to immediately transfer its production overseas. The closure of Imperial Typewriters therefore offers a means to reconceptualize how we understand the 1970s as a period of interlocking crises, as well as the major shift of power from labour to multinational capital which emerged in its wake. The findings of this article indicate that British workers were significantly disempowered before the electoral victory of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Recentering labor conflict in the history of technological obsolescence can offer alternative perspectives on why the British left and trade unions were unable to resist the rise of neoliberalism.

In Capital, Karl Marx provides an immanent critique of capitalism. The text offers a rendering of a political economy that is at times “synchronic” as it describes how capital works irrespective of any given moment in history, but also “diachronic” when it accounts for the historical development of capitalism as Marx knew it. These affordances equip Marx with a language essential to characterizing an “antagonism” between the worker and the capitalist. This antagonism subtends capitalism's demise since the proletariat possesses the numbers to overthrow the bourgeoisie. However, Marxism's assumptive logic only holds water when considering the structural position of the worker. The structural position of the slave entails no such denouement. In his 1983 book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Cedric Robinson notes that “slave labor” helped scaffold “what Marx termed ‘primitive accumulation,’ [but] it would be an error to arrest the relationship there, assigning slave labor to some ‘pre-capitalist’ stage of history . . . this meant that the interpretation of history in terms of the dialectic of capitalist class struggles would prove inadequate”—inadequate, that is, to the task of understanding forms of racial alienation, exploitation, and suffering that lose visibility in class-reductionist discourses.1 In a critical divergence from Robinson's Black radical tradition, Frank Wilderson's contributions to the framework of Afropessimism pose a different yet nonetheless crucial intervention to Marxism. Importantly, Robinson throws into relief the concomitance of slavery and racialization with the logic of capitalism, proclaiming that “the Atlantic slave trade and the slavery of the New World were integral to the modern world economy. Their relationship to capitalism was historical and organic rather than adventitious or synthetic.”2 Wilderson argues, however, that the concomitance of slavery and racialization (particularly for Blackness) circumscribes capitalism on the level of paradigm.

In the interstices of Cold War rivalries and anti-colonial agitation in late 1950s Africa, African workers came into the focus of African nationalist politicians, Western leftists, colonial regimes and state socialist states alike. They were a small, but influential group, increasingly organized in trade unions and capable of bringing whole economies to a halt. European communists on both sides of the Iron Curtain saw these workers not only as part of an inceptive working class but also debated their role as a potential key force in global anti-capitalist revolution – if they had the right concepts. But how could trade union representatives, particularly those ones from Eastern Europe, actually get in touch with their African counterparts? Based on archival materials of the East German Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (FDGB), this article discusses East-West-South connections in labor education with a special emphasis on the role of Western trade union officials working for or affiliated to the communist-dominated World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU). Drawing on their international experience, personal networks and linguistic skills, French and British communists established and intensified links between African trade unions and WFTU affiliates like the FDGB in the 1950s and early 1960s. Their influence facilitated and shaped these East-South connections. First, through their networks in West Africa, Western communists enabled the WFTU and the FDGB to internationalize their concepts of trade union education and integrate it into African political structures. Secondly, we examine the African Workers’ University in Conakry, an East-West-South joint venture between the West African Union Générale des Travailleurs d'Afrique Noire (UGTAN) and the WFTU, where trade unionists from the entire African continent attended courses between 1960 and 1965 and where European communists broadened their horizons while often holding on to rigid views. Thirdly, the article examines how European trade union functionaries talked about African course participants behind closed doors—building on the transcripts from a 1963 WFTU gathering on education for African trade unionists. Emphasizing their insider knowledge, French communists with experience in African trade union education called for innovative pedagogical concepts including a more practice-related education which acknowledged the heterogeneous conditions in different countries. However, they also promoted Eurocentric stage theories and saw a need to “discipline” Africans. The article concludes that the cooperation between actors from East, West and South rested on some shared assumptions, but encounters also led to reconceptualizations and realizations of ideological and practical constraints in international labor education.

The postwar situation in Calcutta was part of the picture of seething anticolonial popular and labor discontent in the Indian subcontinent; this was perhaps the most radical, the most potent, period for the subalterns in the country. However, this complex historical moment with varied, competing, shifting, overlapping tendencies has been reduced and flattened in the historiography. It is as if the twin events of partition and independence were inevitable. City workers, especially the port workers, emerged as a visible and powerful presence in the anticolonial movement. By reconstructing the arena of collective action—focusing on the context, the modalities, and the social content of the major strikes involving port labor or “moments” of radicalism, this article seeks to recover the role of workers in decolonization. It will show how workers contested and outstepped the politics of nationalist leadership(s) and communalism in significant ways multiple times, placing a politics of labor rights and entitlements, of struggles against exploitation and poverty on the postcolonial agenda. The article argues that a “workers’ way,” an alternative even if hazily defined pathway of decolonization, in which new citizens would not be divided on religious lines, was concretized and became a part of the political imagination of the time. The port strike of 1947, a swing-back from the deadliest episode of communal riots, in a matter of months, signifies the extreme fluidity of the political situation in the late 1940s, which is unsurprisingly missed in the conventional historiography. The article finally highlights the limits of postwar radicalism: the “historic” port workers’ strike was ultimately channelized as a legal industrial dispute by the communist leadership of port workers’ union. With their key demand of parity of wages and allowances with government employees, port workers staked their claim to labor institutions offered by the postcolonial state, which was to cordon large sections of them as a privileged layer from rest of the laboring classes in the city.

“To articulate the past historically. . . . It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. . . . Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.” Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History.

This study focuses on welfare capitalism and workers’ housing policy in the Habsburg Empire on the eve of the Great War. It deals with the concessions for buildings containing healthy and affordable workers’ flats. The study argues that the existing research on welfare capitalism concentrated mostly on the entrepreneurs and industrialists as key actors in the building of workers’ flats. As the concessions for the building of workers’ houses suggest, the imperial authorities also maintained welfare capitalism and played a certain role in supporting the construction of workers’ housing. Through the concessions, authorities tried to regulate the company construction and to intervene into places of the everyday. They sought to enforce an appropriate lifestyle and to separate spaces for people of workers’ background, male and female workers, single workers, and workers’ families.

While inherited models of industrial development and the role of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the developmental process associate urbanization and rising industrial output with the industrialization of employment, suggesting that the structural shift to a service-based job market is a sign of developmental “maturity,” such models fail to explain the secular tendency toward “premature deindustrialization” that has become increasingly evident in poor countries worldwide. These models cannot account for the deep bifurcations between output and employment, formality and informality, and industrialization and urbanization observable on the ground in the world's fastest growing cities. Meanwhile, the alternative models of critical development theorists tend to focus on failures of industrial takeoff and classic relations of dependency, none of which adequately account for the phenomenon being observed today. This paper explores an alternate explanation for premature deindustrialization, drawing from Marxian theories of technical change and the secular tendencies of capitalist development. The argument is illustrated with examples taken from the author's field work in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and the Pearl River Delta in China. Ultimately, the phenomenon of premature deindustrialization suggests that the great circle of development may collapse under its own contradictions before industrialization circumnavigates the globe.

This article analyzes the lasting effects of privatization on public-sector telecommunications workers in Argentina's rural interior. I draw on over fifty hours of oral histories carried out from 2015 to 2017 with former ENTel and Telefónica workers in General Pico, in the interior province of La Pampa, Argentina. This unique source base reveals how the material objects themselves acquired symbolic weight in the minds of workers, and how the introduction of new technologies and labor regimes after privatization in 1990 eroded workers' feelings of loyalty toward and ownership over the previously state-run company. This article specifically explores notions of trauma as related to the destruction of the physical materials of work, and the association between that destruction and the mass layoffs that followed. David Harvey's engagement with creative destruction in late capitalism has suggested that “continuous innovation”—whether technological or practical—has meant the devaluation and/or destruction of existing labor relations. I expand this concept to show how this logic of “creative destruction” maps onto spatialized ideas of modernity. The trauma that workers experienced in the 1990s is most productively understood vis-à-vis the unfulfilled promises of “progress” which claimed to bring efficiency, growth, and long-term stability but instead delivered job loss, atomization, and the breakdown of social relations of labor.

Faced with the most up to date washing machine, the undocumented Rosa, newly arrived from Guatemala to Los Angeles, does what many resourceful Mayan women would: She handwashes clothes and lays them on the lawn to dry.1 Played for comic relief in the 1983 movie El Norte, this confrontation of the domestic worker with the machine represents how, presumably in the face of dirty wars in Latin America and rising labor force participation of mothers with small children in the United States, well-to-do households had it both ways: They purchased the latest appliances and relied upon the labor of immigrant women. Recent migrants appeared more tractable than the African Americans who historically had worked in other women's homes. New models superseded old Maytags, but domestic workers never became obsolete, despite the predictions of sociologists and the panicked laments of would-be employers.

A few years ago, the global consulting firm McKinsey and Company began issuing a series of increasingly urgent reports concerning “automation” and the future of work. Defining automation broadly as artificial intelligence and “other digital technologies,” the company promised in its reports that it could advise companies how they might prepare. Amidst this flurry of publication, McKinsey produced several articles specifically on the theme of “The Future of Work in Black America.” With “a new and proprietary data set”—a data set so proprietary readers were not privileged to see it—McKinsey claimed that “automation” would hurt the job prospects of Black Americans, and in particular Black men, more deeply and more broadly than any other demographic group in the United States. The jobs Black people held, McKinsey seemed to believe, were precisely those best performed by robots. For McKinsey's analysts, this conclusion was all but obvious when one considered, first, the racist exclusion of Black Americans from the resources of society, and second, the levels of education required to obtain the jobs Black people in America disproportionately hold, like “truck drivers, food service workers, and office clerks.”

This article delineates a hitherto eclipsed labor history of the Northwest Borneo oilfields. In 2018, Brunei Shell Petroleum (BSP) in an unprecedented move, released to Brunei's national archive two labor registers of the British Malayan Petroleum Company (BMPC-renamed BSP in 1958), with entries dating between the 1940s and 1950s. These registers provided a rare glimpse of the workers who were recruited to the Brunei oilfields as labor, a category distinct from staff. As BMPC labor they worked to rehabilitate the company town and the oilfields that were destroyed during the Second World War by the Japanese army and allied bombing in the British protectorate of Brunei. Like colonial records that amassed information for the control and rule of colonized subjects, each entry in BMPC's ledger meticulously noted the date of engagement, place of employment, wages, work history, as well as some biographical information about its workers. Inadvertently, these entries also revealed modes of worker resistance and assertions of agency, thus providing a glimpse of the hidden transcripts of a labor history shaped by the policies of BMPC in this colonial outpost. My article draws on these two BMPC labor registers to trace a micro-spatial history of “Dayak” labor in the emergent Borneo oilfields. Often obscured in historical records, the registers made visible the ways in which Indigenous workers negotiated and resisted the company's control of its labor force. I explore Dayak labor recruitment within the context of the 1880s-1941 when state borders irrevocably shifted and regional economies were increasingly drawn into a global market. In doing so, I chart migrant labor routes across varied regional economies in Northwest Borneo, BMPC's management of a multiethnic labor force, and company workers' agency.

In June 1926, Shanghai cotton-mill workers initiated strikes at Japanese-owned factories in Xiaoshadu, protesting the dismissal of workers accused of arson in the workshop. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) recognized that Chinese workers’ actions should be aligned with their labor movement strategy, and tried to control the scale of the strikes. In August, responding to an incident where Japanese sailors killed a Chinese man, the CCP redirected to launch a large-scale combined strike, catering to Chinese laborers’ demands of Japanese employers, but not accounting for practical market conditions. Drawing on a variety of sources, this article reveals that dissidence in leadership, weaknesses in grassroots organizations, and unrealized alliances made it impossible for the Communists, so-called the vanguard of the working class, to lead the summer strike. Contrarily, the cotton workers coerced the Communists and their controlled labor unions to maximize their benefits. By mid-September, it had failed, causing a serious setback for the CCP. Compared to the CCP's improvisation and confusion, the capitalists took wise countermeasures in the favorable economic climate of 1926, ultimately triumphing over the Communists and workers.

On September 19, 1922, Beulah M., a thirty-year-old cook, saved a “small child from a vicious cow on Angola.” This event occurred only a few months after her admission to the Louisiana State Penitentiary (LSP), where she was serving a life sentence for alleged murder. The infant was one of the many of the white prison staff's children raised on the penitentiary plantation nestled in a large meander of the Mississippi river. This happy-ending drama featuring a Black woman prisoner and a free white child arose from the “cohabitation” of free white households within the incarcerated population. The incident, quite unexpected in a carceral setting, prompted the penitentiary general manager to place Beulah M. on the “eligibility list” for parole and to grant her “full single good time for meritorious service,” which meant the possibility of an earlier release by a few months. Beulah's action might also have motivated authorities to assign her to be “servant” in the Camp D Captain's house in July 1923, and later to be a nurse in the nine-bedroom “Big House,” occupied by one of the penitentiary staff of higher rank. The peculiar nature of her alleged crime, the beating to death of her seven-year-old Black step-daughter, was apparently not perceived as a deterrent to entrust her to care for white children. Her courageous action toward a white child at Angola might even have been a compelling argument for her early pardon and discharge, which she received only after nine years at Angola, although her plea for a pardon had been rejected at least once before. Beulah M.'s story is the story of a coerced African American domestic laborer in white homes, rewarded for her perceived subservience to the Jim Crow order. It exemplifies one aspect of Black women's experiences of hard labor for the state of Louisiana during the first half of the twentieth century.

The carceral history of Rikers Island, which now houses nine of the New York City jails, begins with garbage and forced labor. The Municipal Farm on Rikers Island, operated by the Department of Public Charities and Correction, opened in 1884 and served as a “prison farm.” Penal farms were common at that time, but what was not common was the simultaneous use of the island as a landfill. Most of the landmass that now comprises Rikers was formed from the refuse of New Yorkers. As the amount of garbage grew the initially productive farm became plagued by rats and other pests—not to mention fetid smells and poor air quality. This history is felt today on the island, as there are shunts into the earth that spew sickening steam, a constant reminder of its origins.